PopMatters' Scores

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For 500 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 The Flag
Lowest review score: 0 Get This Party Started: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 187 out of 187
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 187
  3. Negative: 0 out of 187
187 tv reviews
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  1. Running Wilde: Season 1
    Running Wilde demonstrates a distinct lack of its predecessor's lightning speed and intense saturation of jokes. This may be a structural issue: Running Wilde doesn't offer an intricate ensemble cast, but only the usual sit-commy supporting array, a wacky neighbor and a couple of crazy servants.
  2. Whitney: Season 1
    With its stilted scenes, canned laughter, and handwringing about marriage, Whitney feels more like a step backward.
  3. High School USA!: Season 1
    Most viewers will recognize the South Park-like humor, critiquing the problem by critiquing the mainstream response to it. But unlike South Park, which usually offers something like “hope”(however sarcastically rendered), High School USA! is mostly just bleak.
  4. Night Stalker: Season 1
    Despite these obvious missteps and in between the blatant attempts to appease original fans, Night Stalker shows promise.
  5. Animal Practice: Season 1
    Animal Practice seems to know exactly what it wants to do, it just isn't any good at it.
  6. Raising the Bar: Season 1
    While the particulars of these cases are not uninteresting, they are mostly lost amid the swirl of Jerry and Michelle’s careening between romance and competition, betrayal and “crossing the line.”
  7. Same Name: Season 1
    Some celebrities will surely offer better material to edit than Hasselhoff, famous and not. Future episodes promise encounters with Reggie Bush, Kathy Griffin, and Mike Tyson. Tyson in particular may bring just enough crazy to the table to tip the genre scales back to train wreck.
  8. Scorpion: Season 1
    For all the characters’ feeble development, though, Scorpion doesn’t drag. And Lin’s action sequences at the end look great as well as ludicrous.
  9. Three Rivers: Season 1
    Unlike crime dramas, when the body is usually cleanly dead, by its very nature Three Rivers lingers on the processes of death and near-death at both ends of the story. Just how many poignant farewells can an audience take?
  10. Harry's Law: Season 1
    The show seems aware of the questions raised by this narrative dynamic, but hasn't sorted out a way to do more than note them.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hawthorne: Season 1
    While some subplots are trite (a nurse turns down a paramedic’s romantic overtures, saying she’s “damaged goods"), the premiere hums along whenever Hawthorne is driving it.
  12. Related: Season 1
    Feels strangely empty and hamstrung.... If you like your soaps without novelty, nuance, or bite, Related has four girls for you.
  13. 90210: Season 1
    For the most part, 90210 seems unsure what to do with the Gen-X demographic, fitting in an awkward assortment of teachers, guidance counselors, and big sisters alongside the kid stars.
  14. Kingdom Hospital: Season 1
    A befuddled retirement party for King's clichés. From start to finish, the show dodders about like an Alzheimer's patient on a scavenger hunt.
  15. Chase: Season 1
    For starters, they need to offer intriguing characters and meticulous plotting. The first episode of Chase provides neither.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Gary Unmarried: Season 1
    Not at all intelligent, the show is pretty much immune to any form of legitimate criticism, and further, it will likely be gone within the first few weeks of this television season.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Glory Daze: Season 1
    The first episode offers little to recommend. However, if the show can keep up with the boys as they undergo their own awakenings, then it might eventually offer something fresh to the campus comedy canon. If not, the series will become a comedy of last resort.
  18. Super Fun Night: Season 1
    The jokes fly furiously during the first episode, and the delivery is impeccable all around.
  19. Napoleon Dynamite: Season 1
    Napoleon Dynamite the series forms its comedic syntax in the vernacular of those established shows [The Simpsons, Family Guy] instead of retaining the singular phrasing of Napoleon Dynamite the movie, and suffers as a result.
  20. Unsupervised: Season 1
    Unsupervised appears content to amble along, reiterating what we've seen before.
  21. Outsourced: Season 1
    This is the central duality of the show: half fish-out-of-water tale about Todd, half underdogs-come-from-behind-to-triumph story about his staff. The problem is that neither plot has a sound foundation. For the first, it's hard to identify with Todd because he's not very likable.
  22. The Playboy Club: Season 1
    While options during the era were surely limited, the show's broad strokes don't do justice to the choices women were making, or their self-awareness while making them.
  23. Anna Nicole
    Bruckner takes on the role with gusto, and she and Harron together create someone whose unthinking commitment to the pursuit of “F-U-N” (in Anna’s phrasing) achieves something close to sublimity.
  24. Ironside (2013): Season 1
    Ironside is an exercise in cynicism, a safety-first raid on the vaults with not a shred of respect for either the its prospective audience.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Crumbs: Season 1
    A relentlessly unfunny mid-season replacement comedy from ABC that sucks all the fun out of dysfunction, the show could have been pitched to network execs as "Arrested Development meets Ordinary People." But it shows none of the former's wit or latter's intelligence.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Life is Wild: Season 1
    While Life is Wild is structured as a sort of fishes-out-of-water tale, it is more accurately described as a neocolonial masturbatory fantasy.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Anger Management: Season 1
    The network has risked its own reputation for cutting-edge, genre-busting shows by churning out a sitcom whose main joke is how derivative, unfunny, and unconvincing it is.
  28. Conviction: Season 1
    Conviction is an awkward show.
  29. Head Cases: Season 1
    The Practice should have been this much fun.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hart of Dixie: Season 1
    Hart of Dixie doesn't look to be much more than what you'd unfortunately expect.
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